cheap Shuttle for video conversion
Righto, my father has recently starting editing & converting old hi-8 tapes into DVD, & is finding the Athlon 2600+ at the heart of his newest Shuttle rather slow.
So he wants me to help gather parts for a new Shuttle (he's fine with building it, but doesn't really keep up with the hardware progression) (well, neither do I as much as I used to, which is why I'm here!).
He is used to building Shuttles for under £250 & although I told him that he really won't get much for that price these days, he still wants to keep this as cheap as possible.
So, this machine must be a Shuttle chassis (to fit the space the old one comes out of) & must be capable of running Photoshop CS/Elements nice & quickly (I want him to have 1GiB of RAM for definite) but it also needs to have as much processing grunt behind it as possible to make the video conversion as fast as possible (atm it runs about 1.5x real time, 1x would be great).
So I'm looking for advice on a barebone & processor really. He might use the hard drive from the old machine, because he recently upgraded that to a 120GB which is enough for him. Graphics can be onboard because he doesn't game (though the possibility to add-in a PCI-X card might be nice because he can no longer nick my PC to play IL-2 since I live away from home 9 months of the year!).